It's not every day Margate gets connected to Greenland, but that's what we did in this new CNN Call to Earth piece about the melting ice sheet. The Covid lockdown prevented us from traveling to an icy location to film, so instead Hazel Pfeifer and her team cam for a socially distanced interview on the … Continue reading CNN Call to Earth
Author: jmcook
Glaciologist and data scientist. Nat Geo Explorer, Microsoft AI for Earth, Rolex Awards for Enterprise.
Ubuntu 20.04 boot issues/NVIDIA graphics cards
I have recently experienced problems with Ubuntu 20.04 after an update included updates to the NVIDIA graphics drivers. A normal boot hung on a black screen showing only 'dev/sda1: clean, 552599/6111232 files, 7119295/24414464 blocks' It took me a while to work out how to fix this as it was not immediately apparent that the issue … Continue reading Ubuntu 20.04 boot issues/NVIDIA graphics cards
Not Happening Podcast
The mighty @jeffreygarriock interviewed me for the Not Happening podcast a couple of weeks ago - now available to listen HERE: Or search for the Not Happening Podcast on your podcast platform of choice. I really enjoyed catching up with Jeff - we went to Greenland together a few years ago to make our film, … Continue reading Not Happening Podcast
Computing the Earth
Here's a short article I wrote for Canterbury Christ Church University's "Expert Comment" series on World Environment Day about the role computer scientists might play in battling climate change... The recent Covid-19 pandemic has given the planet a brief breather from human greenhouse gas emissions. Unfortunately, the long-term outlook for the environment remains bleak, likely … Continue reading Computing the Earth
Biodiversity Day Talk: Ice Alive
On 24th May I spoke to the Biodiversity Festival - it was moderated over a Zoom call and live streamed to Youtube. You can watch HERE. I was talking about an often overlooked aspect of glacier melting that ties in very tightly with the theme of biodiversity. Here's a transcript: We do not usually think … Continue reading Biodiversity Day Talk: Ice Alive
Install notes: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on Lenovo x1 Extreme Gen 2
New laptop, new Ubuntu. This post shows step-by-step how I installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on a brand new Lenovo x1 Extreme Gen 2. I kept Windows on a smaller (250 GB) partition with the option to boot into either OS. This post will assume you are working from a Windows 10 OS. You should have … Continue reading Install notes: Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on Lenovo x1 Extreme Gen 2
Python: Pandas
Python Data Analysis Library There is a Jupyter Notebook accompanying this post HERE! In a previous session we explored NumPy in detail, learning about array structures and vectorisation. While NumPy is extremely powerful, it has some limitations. For example, data is organised into rows and columns (often in more than 2 dimensions) without labels other … Continue reading Python: Pandas
Inside the Ice Sheet: Caving expedition
The lockdown has ended all hopes of spring field work this year, so I've been reminiscing about the last time I was out in Greenland, in winter 2018. We were on the ice for a second time to explore the moulins, which are large vertical pipes carved into the ice by melt water in summer … Continue reading Inside the Ice Sheet: Caving expedition
Python: NumPy
There is a Jupyter Notebook accompanying this post HERE. NumPy is a Python package built around the concept of ndarrays (n-dimensional arrays) along with a suite of efficient functions for applying operations over those arrays. Many of the other important packages for data scientists are built on top of NumPy (e.g. Pandas, scikit-learn). In the … Continue reading Python: NumPy
Python: Arrays
Run and experiment with the code in this tutorial using the Jupyter Notebook Intro Abstraction is one of the fundamental concepts in object-oriented programming. It enables a user to implement an idea without having to grapple with its implementation, or put another way it allows access to a high level concept while hiding away lower-level … Continue reading Python: Arrays
